Returning to the Edinburgh Fringe after a sold-out Scottish tour and an OFFFest win for Best Musical/Circus at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, writer and musical director of 'Godfather Death: A Grimm’s Musical' - Jack Avison – chats to Katerina Partolina Schwartz about the show and adaptation process from the Grimm’s fairy tale.
Because of the nature of it, because it was all new, we did take a little bit longer to work on it with the actors, we wanted to make sure that all the music was in the right key for them, that we were getting the best out of the people that were there, which I think that we did.
How would you summarise Godfather Death?
It is a musical adaptation of a little-known Grimm's fairy tale, adapted by two Scottish brothers. It is a black comedy musical about life and death.
Where did the inspiration for Godfather Death come from?
My brother, Finlay. He was studying theatre at York University and read Godfather Death. It’s really short, it’s only a page and a half and when he read it, he was immediately like, “Oh my God, this sounds like it would be a great musical.” And so, he called me, and he was like, “Jack, you’re a musician, do you want to write some music for this musical idea that I have. I think it would be really good.” And that’s kind of how I started. I think that the themes of the fairy tale kind lend themselves to musicals, because there are these grand themes and quite often musicals are able to capture these big characters, like Death and God and the Devil. So, it just seemed to be like, as soon as I heard it, I was like, “That sounds great, let’s do it”.
How did you build on the very limited source material?
There’s lots of things that we wanted to do with it. We obviously had some main characters and then as we started initially talking about the plot and what we wanted to do with it, we were thinking about how we wanted to flesh out all of the different characters. We wanted to make sure that we wanted to write a musical that wasn’t a Disney musical and for it to retain a lot of that dark macabre tone that you get in the fairy tales. And then we wanted the female characters to have autonomy, to have decision-making power. We didn’t want them to just be pawns. In the original fairy tale, The Princess is barely in it at all, she’s just offered as a reward to The Physician and that’s kind of the story; The Physician just gets The Princess and that’s kind of it. In the version that we did last year at the Fringe, the character of The Princess still had to be quite small, just purely for timing. We had a lot more and we really had to cut it down. That was the main thing we wanted; to flesh out the part of The Princess, because we’d had so many ideas for her, what she’d be like and then we were just restrained a little bit by the time.
Godfather Death isn’t a particularly well-known fairy tale. Considering the nature of the oral tradition of fairy tales and the limited source material, do you feel like that gave you some creative freedom?
Absolutely, one of the great things about adapting it was that it is new writing. Everything that we’ve written is original and we’ve basically had freedom to take these almost like little sketches of characters, we’ve been free to manipulate those. Again, it’s so short and they’re almost written as archetypes - like The King, The Princess, The Physician - and so they’re kind of just very, very briefly sketched characters. For example, The King, we wrote into a Queen. We had the character of Death, which we were like, “Death’s there but Death’s barely described”. So, then we could start from scratch. It gave us freedom to explore lots of different options and create what we think is a unique and new piece of writing. We weren’t really interested in redoing one of the classic fairy tales, we really wanted to do something new and do something that people hadn’t seen before.
Is there anything in the musical that deviated from the source material?
The main one would be things like the character of The Princess, for example, it doesn’t really exist in the fairy tale. We had to change some plot points. In the fairy tale there’s some bits that are just in a sentence to explain some exposition, but we needed a way to visually show what was happening on the stage, so modifying some things, like the way the candles work. The theatre is like a visual medium as well a written medium, and so we wanted to make sure that we could portray those feelings through the visual medium as well.
How did you find and develop the Death’s voice and narration?
That’s one of the things from developing the original text, is that Death doesn’t have many major characteristics. Initially when we had first started putting together what would be a plot, we didn’t have Death narrating, we actually had some different ideas about how to do it. Then when it came time to doing a 50-minute show, the solution that we came up with was having Death narrate because we were like, “Okay, that allows us to give Death a lot of this characterisation that Death wouldn’t have otherwise, whilst also letting everyone know what’s happening in the show and making sure everyone understands it”. Finn went off and started writing all these parts, and then it was a bit of a combination. We always knew that we wanted Death to be kind of amoral. Death isn’t meant to be gendered; Death is this non-human entity. Death is so far removed from mortals that Death couldn’t possibly understand that what we are going through and is on a totally different plane of existence. We wanted to start emphasising that. It really took when Andrew [Lodge] took on the role, he really did make it his own. I mean, Andrew has so much experience in theatre and musicals, he’s also spent time working at the Edinburgh Dungeons, and he really took the lines and made it his own. And as soon as we saw him do it in the audition, we were like, “Okay we can work with this”.
Once you wrote the musical, how did you work with the cast to bring it to life?
The first time we did it was last year. Finn and I had been working on it on and off for a while, and then the year before that, so in the summer of 2022, we were like, “Right, we’re going to do it, we’re going to commit to doing it, we’re going to book a venue, and we’re just going to trust that we can get it there”. So that December, we booked a venue and went, “Okay we’ve got 8 months to finish writing the show, we’ve got to get a cast, we’re going to do all the stuff that needs to be done to take it”. And we were lucky enough to get a great group of four people who were going to come on as the cast. Basically, what we did is; I was based in Glasgow at the time, and I did weekly rehearsals with each person; so every different week a different person would come, and we would work on individual songs and then I’d start pairing them up, like, “You two have a song together, so you now come on this week”. And then eventually that was built up until everybody was coming, all four people all the time, then we were really working on ensemble stuff. Finn -who was working for a theatre company down in Reading - came up to Scotland and we had a week of rehearsals with everybody together. And then that was us going to the show.
It was all new material; I wouldn’t say it was in the process of being written but it was certainly in the process of being modified because we were still working out exactly the format that it was going to take. With the timings and stuff, it meant that it couldn’t quite work in the same way a typical musical where the set script would be sent out to everybody, learn it yourselves, come in and then do it kind of thing. Because of the nature of it, because it was all new, we did take a little bit longer to work on it with the actors. We wanted to make sure that all the music was in the right key for them, that we were getting the best out of the people that were there, which I think that we did. I think that ultimately everybody benefitted from that process.
When it comes from being words on the page, song demos, lyrics, and music and then you give it out to people, and hearing it out of other people’s voices, you start to realise, ”Oh actually, we could do it this way, maybe this can happen”. It’s so nice to see it take form in front of you and become something better.
